Front Groups And Republican Self-Delusion

Not every right-winger is a moron. Sure, every teabagger is a moron, but some right-wingers aren't teabaggers. This week Alabama winger Byron York was asking his fellow Republicans if they've been "fooling themselves" about Obamacare. He may not have figured out yet that his fellow Republicans have built themselves an operation that fools themselves about every little ole thing.

When I mentioned that every teabagger is a moron, I wasn't trying to be gratuitously mean. It was just a plain vanilla statement of fact. These are people who have persuaded themselves that they're playing the role of Patriots (rather than Tories), while all their ideas are Tory ideas and they show their contempt for Americans Patriots by banishing Thomas Jefferson from the history books when they get control. Too stupid and delusional to know any better, they have made themselves into the foot soldiers of a plutocracy that would enslave their children and grandchildren. Without them-- and similar deluded fools-- the political right would consist of a few thousand super-rich people in gated communities. This is what's left of the Republican Party. In his book, The Machine, Lee Fang goes into some depth talking about the mechanics of Republican self-delusion.

While front groups have existed for years, the use of such hoaxes has skyrocketed in response to Obama’s election. Facing a tidal wave of progressive reforms promised by Obama on the campaign trail, corporations and the right wing leaned on a cadre of public relations operatives skilled in the art of manipulating policy debates and reshaping political discourse on a national level. These PR mavens sit at the hub of influence within the right-wing machine. They serve as the strategists who ultimately plan how to kill reform-- from conducting the research, to inventing phony groups driving a certain message, to coordinating the attacks. With large-scale reforms promised in energy, health care, financial regulation, labor, and tax policy, front groups have multiplied and become more sophisticated than ever.

Some of the deceptive third-party groups used by political operatives of today are temporary, ad hoc “coalitions” created to sway a single issue area or piece of legislation. When Democrats pushed to pass student lending reform-- which cut $60 billion in waste from private lenders who had been channeling the loans while skimming taxpayer money off the top-- the private lending industry, including PNC, Sallie Mae, SunTrust, Nelnet, and others, contracted the PR firm Qorvis Communications to stop the legislation. On of the many tactics used by Qorvis was the creation of a purportedly “grassroots” organization called Protect Student Choice. The website for the group did not disclose that it was bankrolled by profiteering student loan companies and banks. Qorvis staffer Karen Henretty posed as a news reporter on the program Focus Washington, along with officers of the College Republicans to criticize the legislation and falsely claim that it hurt students. When the Senate passed lending reform, Qorvis’s front lost a purpose and disappeared.

Other fronts are permanent rent-a-front groups-- ostensible “think tanks” that serve as vessels for corporate lobbying campaigns. Many rental fronts pose as nonprofits dedicated to ideological goals, like removing regulation or cutting taxes. The specific issues triumphed by a rent-a-front are often linked to its donors. One of the loudest conservative groups defending BP after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, was Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks nonprofit. The group alleged that the Obama administration had no right to negotiate a $20 billion escrow account to compensate the victims of the spill. A PowerPoint presentation showed that starting in 2007, the oil industry, including companies like BP, had concocted a multitiered campaign through seemingly grassroots groups like FreedomWorks to promote offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of California. FreedomWorks never disclosed this relationship, or the fact that FreedomWorks counts the American Petroleum Institute among its major donors. Armey’s group positioned itself instead as simply a staunch defender of corporations against all government intrusion, even when that corporation spilled millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf.

Corporate efforts to steer the debate are often hidden behind nonprofits that are supposedly formed for a niche audience as well. An ExxonMobil-linked public relations firm called CDR Communications helped create a variety of fronts opposed to action on carbon pollution. One group, called the Cornwall Alliance, organized pastors and the evangelical community to oppose efforts to cap greenhouse gases. Cornwall Alliance released a DVD, Resisting the Green Dragon, which compared the belief in global warming with paganism. Spokesmen for the group regularly appeared on conservative media, including the Glenn Beck program, to tout anticlean energy conspiracy theories under the guise of objective religious commentators.

The public relations industry is often paired with other influence-peddling strategies. While insider lobbyists work within the halls of Congress to pressure lawmakers, political operatives whip up public outrage and sow divisions among reform proponents. Most important, even though PR firms are akin to lobbying organizations, albeit through channels outside Congress, they do not have to disclose their clients or how much they are being paid. In many cases their true intent is never discovered. This chapter is a window into some of the new, innovative campaign strategies employed by public relation experts working against progressive reforms.